GreatWyrmGab

If it looks like a hummingbird, and flies like a hummingbird, it might just be a hummingbird hawk-moth! Like their namesake, hummingbird hawk moths can beat their wings incredibly fast- up to 90 times per second! This allows it to hover and perform tight aerial manuvers. In addition, they have a very long proboscis, which allows it to sip nectar from deep-welled flowers that other insects can't access.

I'm making this post on the behalf of Hamza and Sami Al-Khalili, who are currently trying to raise money to help their large family in Gaza.

Does that make sense? People view fandom itself as diverse, queer, progressive, radical, woman dominated, etc so anything they do within it gets a pass, especially when it's backed up by fans with the same biases as them

I don't think fandom as a whole is worse than mainstream culture but I don't think it's better either. (Although ofc individual spaces can turn insular and rancid.) A lot of spaces formed around popular media just attract people who want their views validated with a progressive aesthetic but when someone pushes back on a micro aggression it becomes very clear that it's only an *aesthetic* and they're there to have fun and not be challenged

The infuriating part is when people want to have both at once: to write whatever they want because it's their silly lil guy hobby and not be criticised or made to self reflect at all (which is hard because they take discussion of wider fandom trends as a personal attack); but also for their fanworks to be treated not only as serious art but also as serious activism. You can have one or the other but you can't have both. And it results in unexamined biases being normalised and spread further because fandom's progressive reputation gives them undeserved legitimacy. (Especially given the tendency of some fans to claim that published books are all either booktok hetslop or written by dead white racists and AO3 is the only place they can read stories by and about queer people/women/people of colour. Which actively erases the contributions of many many published authors from marginalised groups but okay 😤)

Undertale has Mettaton so happy and fulfilled and the "Mad Dummy" is so all over the place that I think it made people automatically think of Mettaton as the "older sibling" who has it all figured out, but now in Deltarune, with the super-content way Pink acts in the dark world vs how sad and self-isolating Mettaton is as a "nobody", that dynamic is pretty much completely reversed... Another instance of Deltarune mirroring Undertale.

yep, that's what I do :)

the reason you don't need an AA on monotherapy is because it works via what's called "gonadal suppression". roughly speaking, your hypothalamus monitors levels of sex hormone and, if the levels are low, it signals the pituitary gland, which signals the gonads (in our case, testicles) to make more sex hormone. this is called the HPG axis

crucially, the hypothalamus does not differentiate between testosterone and estrogen. if you raise your estrogen levels high enough, it's like "yep all good" and does not signal for more production. this is why, in the context of monotherapy, we say that your T is suppressed and not blocked: since production is being suppressed, there's no T to block.

on average, a blood level of 250 pg/ml estradiol is enough to suppress 90% of T production, which is enough to prevent masculinization.

injectable monotherapy is, in most cases, the most affordable method of HRT. a single $80 vial containing 400mg of estradiol enanthate works out to, at a typical 4/mg/wk dosage, 100 weeks (4 weeks shy of 2 years) of complete monotherapy. less than a dollar a week :)

If you'll permit a tangent: Tassets and faulds, people! Tassets and faulds! You can find reference images on all sorts of websites these days; even Wikipedia, if you don't want to check what museums have photos of their exhibits available. It's not hard! Or at least, it's only hard in ways that drawing bad armor is already hard.